The Way of Chuang Tzu

by Thomas Merton

Chuang Tzu himself would be the first to say that you cannot tell people to do whatever they want when they don’t even know what they want in the first place!

After all, the idea that one can seriously cultivate his own personal freedom merely by discarding inhibitions and obligations, to live in self-centered spontaneity, results in the complete decay of the true self and of its capacity for freedom.

The way of Tao is to begin with the simple good with which one is endowed by the very fact of existence. Instead of self-conscious cultivation of this good (which vanishes when we look at it and becomes intangible when we try to grasp it), we grow quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life, and this way is analogous (at least psychologically) to the Christian “life of faith.” It is more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the fruit of one’s effort.

All deliberate, systematic, and reflexive “self-cultivation,” whether active or contemplative, personalistic or politically committed, cuts one off from the mysterious but indispensible contact with Tao, the hidden “Mother” of all life and truth.

The true tranquillity sought by the “man of Tao” is Ying ning, tranquillity in the action of non-action, in other words, a tranquillity which transcends the division between activity and contemplation by entering into union with the nameless and invisible Tao.

It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being “reasonable” that we become, ourselves, unreasonable.